The Bossier banner. [volume] (Bellevue, Bossier Parish, La.) 1859-1952, 1887-04-28
!. HYDRoPHoRtA CURED.

y
The Strange Remedies" Applied Among
Various People in Days Gone BY.
A French mana of letters, M Henri
daidoz, has just published most curl.
BUS and valuable work on mad dogs
| ola Rage ct st. Hubert J which de-.
| nonstrates the continuity, not only of
tsmad1ess inthe dog, but of folly in the
man. Dogs says. q writer with refer
ence to this book, have probably gone
| mad from the beginning, and man has,
i fromthe beginning, actually tried.to
cure himself with "a hair, = or a. portion
Of the, flesh of the dog that bit him.
Pliny in his natural historyrec ommends
aluncheon of boiled dog as the soyran-
EST thing on earth for. hydrophobia.
f'They all do it, in Europe, in India,
lin China, and NJ Gaidoz quotes Mr..
Taylor and the Edna. Notes and Quer-,
les, with many other authorities in this
ludicrous piece Of popular medicine Put
ting on thewounda burnt cinderof dog
is also agood prescription, according to
Pliny. Mad dogs are far. older than
Pliny, and are mentioned in the Eighth
| book of the Had. soAs. to why dog
! goes mad, beyond his, wish ito serve
his private ends (he explanation of
| Goldsmith), the ancients and foreign
fpeoples hadaa variety of opinions. Sir
Richard Burton, in his Pilgrimage to
Mecca, " found that Arab dogs 90 mad
| when they have tasted of flesh that falls
| from hansen Tho foo,,,z of IL -,o..s -
classical times, was thought i. to turn
dogs mad which drank it; but dog
which would drink sea-foam would do
any thing, and is clearly mad already.
As M. Gaidez remarks, in popular med
icine every disease is caused either by
enehantnient or by the indwelling Of a
devil las ina epilepsy, or by worms
which may be short. for microbes. -
In Scotland the wise man still shows
you, in a basin of water, the worms that
cause toothache. They are notgexactly
big enough to use for bait for trout; but
they are many thousands of times bigger
than microbes. The aworrn" that
makes dogs go deranged is presumed to,
reside, in his tail, which the human,
therefore, are often at pains to bite off
la process frowned on by more edu-.
Gated enthusiasts Needless to add
that the root of the dogrose has been
recommended as cure, simply because
the flower is called dogrose.a isise
! Another way, ns,l as the cookery
books have it, of curing hydrophobia in
ancient times was to drink the water
of a certain fountain in Arcadia. The
earth of Lemnos taken in water was
also excellent. In Nine. de Sevignes
| time people went to the seaside for hy-
drophobia. Oddly enough, the Greeks
do not appear to have employed eau
terization. The goddess who cured
mad dogs and their bites was naturally
Diana, swhose joy,n as we think no
less an authority than Richardus Swiv-
ellerus observes, sis in the chase
and who, therefore, is interested in
hounds. The goddess Diana is fled;
but if M. Gaidoz be right the power of
the goddess in the matter of hydropho-
bia is not yet extinct; it has only been
handed on to St. Hubert. This gentle
man was of the blood of King Phara-
mond. We all know how he met
miraculous stag, with crucifx be-
tween its horns, and how he was con-
verted. 1t is less familiar that Our
| Lady, when he was consecrated bishop,
sent him down a beautiful stole from
Heaven, in the hands of an angel. This
| stole still exists in the town Of ST. HUI
| bert-Poix is the station-and you
reach the holy place by tramway 1t
is not the physical relics of ST.. HUI
| bert that now work miracles and cure
| hydrophobia; it is the sacred stole that
fell from Heaven. The stole is used
in the exorcism of evil spirits generally;
and is so efficacious that it has before
| now made dragon as mild as sheep
People bitten by mad dogs were con-
fused, perhaps, with the common herd
of people possessed with devils by the
church. The way in which the stole is
used has now to be described. The
| method is at least as old as the eleventh
century, and even then was styled 'sthe
ordinary manner" The process is
| called la table. The patient is taken
into the treasury of the abbey, where
the relics lie. The penitent for that is
the technical term) kneels before the
priest, who recites certain formale,
after which the penitent utters brief
prayer to st. Hubert. Then the priest,
with a pen-knife, makes a shallow in
cision in the skin of the forehead of the
man who has been bitten. The skin is
slightly raised, and thread or two of
the sacred stole that was brought down
by the angel is introduced. A bandage
is then put round the head and worn
for nine days. The cure. in fact, is
merely the bodily insertion into the
flesh of a sacred object, scrap of
relic.-St James Gazette.
Fishes Out of Water. a
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